Monday, September 15, 2008

Mass Graves at Sobibor – 3rd Update

As shown in the original article and the previous two updates, at least three of the mass graves in the former "Camp III" sector of Sobibor extermination camp can be made out on an air photo by Paul Bauman, and which sent to me by Yoram Haimi, director of the Sobibor Archaeological Project:

And at least four of these mass graves are visible on my enlargement of a satellite photo provided by none other than my special friend Greg Gerdes:

who shot himself in the foot by pointing out this satellite photo.

After spouting a hilariously idiotic conspiracy theory about manipulative "turf-building" and "landscaping", see the 1st update, Gerdes has apparently decided that it was better for his articles of faith not to push this issue any further and limit his utterances in this respect to his beaten "alleged" and "(not)one single this-and-that" – rhetoric, which is too stupid to warrant further comment.

Instead he has, perhaps in order to distract attention from his satellite photo blunder and/or to help himself get over it, turned to making a fuss about the monument known as the "ash mountain", which currently has the aspect visible on the above air and satellite photo and on the ground photos like the one below from the Sobibor Archaeological Project's website:

"Where is the giant pit that all those alleged human remains were dug out of in constructing Sobibor's "ash mountain / huge pile of human remians?"

RM:

Quote:"It was made with soil collected from above the ground, which included human ashes and bone fragments"

LOL!!!! So what he / Yoram are saying is - huge piles of human remains were found, collected, piled into a giant mound, yet not one single photo of this was taken. Not one single report was made. All the evidence that was above the level ground was collected, but the evidence that was below the level of the ground was not collected. And everyone simply forgot about this incredible discovery for 35 years until Kola "discovered" the "huge mass graves."

There's never a dull moment when dealing with the dull one!

In his post of Sun Sep 14, 2008 12:02 pm on the same thread, he follows up this blustering with the following sermon:

Yes MrNobody - NO EVIDENCE AT ALL.

NOT ONE single pit where the remains of the "ash mountain / huge mound of human remains." allegedly came from. The dull one seems to think that it's possible for a mountain to just appear magically. If the mountain was made from collected soil above the ground, that soil / remains obviously had to have been dug up out of pits from below ground. In this way, the dull one is trying to get by with an "explaination" for the existence of a huge mound without having to show where the corresponding huge pit or series of small pits came from. (It must be nice to live in Wonderland huh?)

And not one single photo of the "ash mountain / huge pile of human remains" construction. Not one single report of the original discovery of the alleged remains of tens of thousands of jews. (Look at the size of the mound in comparison to the alleged mass graves. It would contain at least 50% of all human remains found on site - IF the story is true.)

And not just one single pit, they have yet to prove the existence of one single grave, one single body, one single pound of crushed bone or even so much as one single tooth.

NOTHING.

The more I study Sobibor, the more I believe that it is the most vacuous of all the nonsensical holocausts within the holocaust. (Now that's saying something!) And the great thing about it all is, I have the dullest of the dull to thank for all my new knowledge! Every lie that it tells is just another opportunity for me to do more research and learn new things. (Thank you dull one.)

What the poor fellow is trying to tell us – or to convince himself of, his hysteria indicating that he doesn’t quite believe his BS himself – is that the supposed absence of photographic records of or reports about the monument’s construction or the pits from which the monument's contents were supposedly taken, which he postulates would have been a spectacular discovery at the time, means that the contents of the "ash mountain" are not what their designation suggests them to be, i.e. that the mound does not contain human ashes.

As so often before, Gerdes has it all wrong again and just succeeded in once more revealing his ignorance and the poverty of his reasoning.

First of all, it’s not exactly realistic (to put it politely) to assume that photos or reports about the making of the monument at Sobibor and the origin of it’s contents do not exist just because they are not available in English on the internet, as Gerdes obviously does. What is more, much information available in Poland, namely about crime site investigations and robbery digging at former extermination camp sites, has only recently been made available to the public at all, on the web or otherwise. For instance, the first translations from Polish of examining judge Lukaszkiewicz’ report of 13.11.1945 about excavations on the site of Treblinka extermination camp were published, as far as I know, in Mattogno & Graf’s book Treblinka: Extermination Camp or Transit Camp?, the English language edition of which appeared in October 2002 (it’s a bid sad to note that no historian, at least outside Poland, seems to have taken note of this important documentation of physical evidence to the mass murder at Treblinka, and that the first to point it out were "Revisionist" charlatans trying – rather unconvincingly, as I pointed out in my related article – to use it in support of their contentions). Another example is evidence related to the robbery digging at Treblinka, most of which was only conveyed to the public outside Poland through Dr. Neander’s translation into German of a Polish newspaper article that appeared in January 2008 and my English translation of Dr. Neander’s translation (both available on the RODOH thread Gold Rush in Treblinka). The article’s revelations about the "Treblinka Gold Rush" are news even inside Poland, and rather embarrassing ones at that.

Second, it’s not as if the human remains contained in the soil that the "ash mountain" monument was made of had been a spectacular discovery when the monument was built in the 1960s, moreover one that could be expected to have been made known even beyond the Iron Curtain at a time when historical, forensic and public interest in the Nazi genocide of the Jews was awakening. For the Polish government and Polish society these remains, just like the human remains lying around at Belzec and Treblinka, were related to what can be called a dirty secret, something that many knew but few talked or wrote about: the robbery-digging, by people seeking for valuables supposed to have been buried with the murdered Jews, that had brought these remains to the surface, and that had been going on since the respective areas had been overrun by the Red Army in 1944. As concerns Treblinka, this robbery digging is the subject of the aforementioned Polish newspaper article, which mentions the embarrassment felt by those who were aware of and mostly chose to remain silent about it:

Martyna Rusiniak thinks that a part of the pits are the hyena's heritage. Especially from the time when bombs were used for "extraction". The young historian shows us photos of the largest postwar excavation sites. The pits have a length of ten meters, one of them looks like the cuction pit of a several-story building.

"Loud" excavations may have taken place until the end of the 1950s. However, no one wanted to have heard the detonations in the former camp.[my emphasis – RM] After publication of Rachela Auerbach's book in 1947 the official press was silent about the gold fever[my emphasis – RM] – with one exception. In 1957 "Trybuna Mazowiecka" brought a sharp article headed "The Shame". The author, L. Wieluński, indignant about the ravishing, wrote about the grave robbers: "The paw of the animal, clad in human skin, the paw that digs out human corpses, corpses of martyrs, slaps us in the face every single day. A slap that dishonors and hurts."

Robbery digging was also commonplace at Belzec and Sobibor, as mentioned by Yitzhak Arad on page 380 of his book Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard Death Camps:

Scenes of this kind took also place in the fields of Belzec and Sobibor. The search for treasures continued. The area was dug up again and again, and each section of the land was checked thoroughly by local people and people from afar who tried their luck. These acts ceased only when the Polish government decided to turn the camp areas into national memorial sites.

Given the embarrassment over this phenomenon by those who were confronted with it, it would not be surprising at all if photographic and/or written records of what the extermination camp sites looked like before memorials were erected there had been and mostly still were hidden in archives, rather than being made the subject of public attention as would correspond to Gerdes’ ignorant postulations.

Nevertheless there are some exceptions to the rule. A few photographs taken during or shortly after World War II, which clearly or probably show the results of robbery-digging, made it to the archives of the Ghetto Fighters’ House. These photos are shown hereafter.

GFH caption: "The woods of Sobibor, photographed after the war."

GFH caption: "The woods in the area where the Sobibor extermination camp had stood."

GFH caption: "Pits in the woods near the Sobibor extermination camp, in which victims were buried."

The first of these photos shows a wood clearing with a mound of what seems to be upturned/excavated soil, probably the work of robbery diggers.

The second photo shows upturned soil, the lighter tone of which compared to its surroundings is not the result of overexposure, and in the background also a man with his back turned to the camera, who could be a robbery digger.

The third photo shows a pit in the ground, clearly the work of robbery diggers. Soil extracted from the pit can be seen in the foreground.

Upturned soil such as visible in these pictures is what the "ash mountain" monument was made of. It is doubtful, however, whether – as Gerdes would have it – all soil brought to the surface by robbery diggers went into this monument, because human bone fragments, such as can be seen on this photograph, still litter the area around the mass graves.

Gerdes also reveals a wrong idea of the importance of the "ash mountain" as a receptacle of human remains when he claims that it "would contain at least 50% of all human remains found on site" because it has a larger area than the "alleged" mass graves surrounding it.

As can be seen on my enlarged and commented version of Gerdes’ satellite photo:

the area covered by the "ash mountain" is in fact larger than any of the mass graves that can be made out on this photo. However, the mound doesn’t seem to be very high. Considering the following photos from the archives of the Ghetto Fighters’ House:

GFH caption: "Miriam Novitch at the remembrance site on the grounds of the Sobibor extermination camp, photographed beside the place where bones and ashes of those who perished in the camp had been gathered"

GFH caption: "A mound of the remains of victims of the Sobibor extermination camp, at the remembrance site on the grounds of the camp"

the mound has by my estimate a height of 3 meters or so at its tip and two meters or less throughout most of its area. The mass graves found by Prof. Kola in 2001, on the other hand, have an average depth of 4.6 meters. And what is more, we don’t know in what proportion human ashes were present in soil dug up by treasure seekers, which would depend on how deep these people dug.

So stating that the "ash mountain" must contain a high proportion or even "at least 50%" of the human remains in the Sobibor mass graves area is another baseless postulation.

But then, what better than baseless postulations can one expect from a benighted fanatic who ignores or dismisses all evidence he is shown and repeats his "(not) one single this-and-that" - mantra over and over again, and who in all seriousness demands that his opponent show what pit or pits the content of the Sobibor "ash mountain" came from?